Issue # 1426      2 September 2009

Environmental collateral damage in oil and gas push

Bob Briton

There were no surprises last week when Environment Minister Peter Garrett approved the giant Gorgon gas project off the northwest coast of WA. The Minister did his best to appear rigorous and demanding but it was common knowledge the deal was in the bag. The Prime Minister had already lauded it to the sky. The first and second stages of it had been approved long ago when opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull was Howard’s environment minister.

When taken together with other recent gas supply agreements, the latest deal brings the total value of future gas exports from new ventures to about $100 billion. It was going to be the equivalent of a letter of resignation for the minister to heed the advice of environmental experts and say “No, not yet and not there.”

“Clearly I’m aware of the economic size of this proposal but the specific matters that I had to determine were whether or not this proposal would have an adverse impact, particularly on threatened or listed species. I made it on that basis and I’ve determined that it won’t,” Garrett told the media. He was referring to protests that the decision to allow the construction of a processing plant and port on Barrow Island, which is a refuge for a number of endangered species including the flatback turtle, the golden bandicoot and the blind gudgeon fish.

“Barrow Island is Australia’s Galapagos – it deserves much better treatment than this,” said Dr Gilly Llewelly of the World Wildlife Federation (WWF). The WWF says the whole project should have been reviewed in light of the fact that its size had been increased by 50 percent from the original plan. The WWF and other environmental groups are calling for the processing plant to be located at Ashburton or some other mainland location. They have doubts about how safe the storage of carbon dioxide in a saline aquifer below Barrow Island’s nature reserve is. They are not alone.

While the Barnett government in WA also claims paternity of the Gorgon gas deal, its own Environment Protection Agency is worried about what is touted as the world’s largest carbon capture and storage experiment. Two fissures on the sea bed known as the Pluto and Gondwit faults, threaten to leak heavier-than-air carbon dioxide into the environment where it will sit in pools and present an asphyxiation hazard. A panel of experts advising project partners Chevron, Shell and Exxon Mobil reported the same concern. The companies have an “agree to disagree” stance about this advice.

The burial of carbon dioxide is being presented as a boon to the environment. Even if the extraction and storage project works perfectly, it will only deal with 40 percent of the CO2 produced in processing. It will still release 5.45 million tonnes of the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere giving WA one of the heaviest carbon footprints in the world. And more gas projects are in the pipeline. Mark McCallum of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) says that his members have 16 proposals nationally for major gas developments and nine of those are in WA’s northwest.

The northwest coast, including the area surrounding Barrow Island, is supposed to be converted into a massive marine conservation park by 2012. A spokesman for the environment minister now insists “the reserves will include a range of different zones to ensure that human activities (including oil and gas among others) are consistent with conservation objectives.”

The vision is changing and everybody is claiming to be powerless to do anything about it. Garrett claims his ministerial powers do not allow him to consider the lessons to be learnt from the recent oil leak from the West Atlas rig. The Department of Resources claims the Commonwealth would face huge “displacement” or compensation costs and legal action if a resource developer were prevented from using a current exploration license. Mr McCallum of the APPEA says the government’s “use it or lose it” policy regarding licenses means they are legally required to mine any oil or gas they find.

“Increasing oil and gas activity in Australia’s North West is having a dangerous cumulative impact on some of the richest marine habitats on the planet,” the WWF warned last week. Chevron is ready to get on with the Gorgon project and only needs partners Shell and Exxon Mobil to sign the paperwork. This is a foregone conclusion and, while the state and federal governments celebrate a short-term lifeline to an economy made desperately reliant on resource exports, the cost to the environment is mounting.

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